1988 10Best Cars

Favorites picked and reputations staked while you wait.

DON SHERMAN

Jan 1, 1988

Stoke up the yule log and pour yourself another cup of flog, because it’s that Ten Best time of year again. Ready or not, we’re back with another lapful of our best work to prove that there really is a Santa Claus.

In truth, it’s not fair to label this issue “work.” We do scurry about like frenzied elves as we wrap up this package of ten stories, but the C/D staff loves any excuse to dig into the archives in search of automotive glad tidings.

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As always, the centerpiece of this celebration is Car and Driver’s pick of the Ten Best Cars. It’s a task that gets tougher every ear, but what better way is there to mark automotive progress?

The Ten Best Engineering Breakthroughs that have made today’s fleet of cars so wonderful are assessed by technical director Csaba Csere. Our man of the seas, Brock Yates, took a break from salmon fishing to identify the pillars of the world automotive community in Ten Best Moguls. As a reminder that the road to success is full of potholes, Pete Lyons pays tribute to the Ten Best Ahead-of-Their-Time Machines. Those who have managed to negotiate the ruts of life over the past twelve months—and others who haven’t—are singled out by associate editor Art St. Antoine in Ten Best Winners and Losers.

On the lighter side, editor at large Patrick Bedard reports on the results of his quest for the Ten Best Trivial Pursuits. Executive editor Rich Ceppos giggled himself silly choosing the Ten Best Car-Toons. And associate editor Tony Assenza dug up the Ten Best Weird Races in the world. Trust us: he’s an authority.

We have no intention of leaving you faithful readers out of this Ten Best fest: senior editor Larry Griffin makes good on our promise to publish the Ten Best Reader Photographs. What’s more, managing editor Don Coulter has magnanimously tipped the editorial hat to those of you who may have ulterior motives for reading Car and Driver: his selection of Ten Best Cop Stories is not to be construed as a sop, but anything those of you in authority can do to erase a few points from Art St. Antoine’s conviction record will be sincerely appreciated.

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The traffic jam of fine automobiles on this page should give you an inkling of what it’s like to winnow the Ten Best Cars from the hundreds of models on the American market. The C/D editors begin the yearly process by nominating their favorites from past road tests. The only limit is price: we exclude cars costing more than $35,000 in base price (up five grand this year), under the theory that any car costing so much had better be great.

Phase two is a hands-on, head-to-head evaluation. This year, we assembled 30 contenders and one Vixen XC motorhome at Chrysler’s Chelsea proving grounds. The Vixen served as a cozy office-away-from-office, and the back roads of southern Michigan provided the ups, downs, lefts, and rights we needed to shake out our collection of candidates. After several days of driving, the seven C/D editors on the Ten Best jury agreed on only one thing: there wasn’t a turkey in the 30-car fleet.

We compared notes and searched souls for a while, then retired to quarters to ponder our votes for five American-made and five imported cars, A few hours later, the first ballot revealed ten clear winners.

That is not to say there were no surprises. Seven out of the ten victors were on our Ten Best list last year. Honda is the motor company on the move: not only did it hold on to the two slots it won in ‘87, it added three more this year.

That makes the Accord the one perfect player, with six wins in all six Ten Best years. The Audi 5000 is back with five gold stars; Betty Furness, eat your hat. The Corvette has been here four times. The Saab 9000 Turbo and Ford’s Mustang and Taurus are now three-time winners. The Acura Integra, the Honda Civic, and the Honda CRX are basking in their second year of glory, while the Acura Legend Coupe is our only new recruit. Ladies and gentlemen, we present the 1988 edition of the Ten Best Cars in all the land.

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And in other news that year:

Top-selling Cars: Winner of Super Bowl XIX: Winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture:Winner of the World Series:Sources: Top-selling Cars, Ward's Automotive Year Book; Super Bowl Winners, SuperBowl.com; Best Picture Winners, Oscars.org; World Series Winners, WorldSeries.com

Nineteen eighty-seven was a banner year for Acura. The Integra won a position on our Ten Best list, outgunned nine other pocket pistols in our “Hot-Shot Shoot-Out,” and drove its way into the hearts and garages of more than 50,000 American customers. In August, J.D. Power & Associates spotted the Acura nameplate at the top of its annual Customer Satisfaction Index. The brand was off to one of the best starts in imported-car history.

The Integra’s claims to fame are a sixteen-valve heart of gold, snappy looks, a truly lovable driving personality, and a window sticker that brings tears to the eyes of General Motors executives. C/D editors swoon. Car shoppers reach for their checkbooks.

The shift in the dollar-yen exchange rate has kicked the Integra’s base price over ten grand, but another piece of news should help to ease the pain: for 1988, the 1590cc engine puts out five more horsepower. Stronger readings on the J.D. Power dynamometer are certain.

The Acura Legend Coupe is the most expensive car Japan exports to the U.S. With this V-6—powered, front-drive, tastefully styled five-seater, Honda has served notice to the prestige kings—BMW, Jaguar, Mercedes—that their sanctity is threatened. While the Europeans charge $40,000 to $50,000 for their supercoupes, the Acura flagship is a serious competitor for about two thirds as much. The Legend Coupe is styled with international lines, will run 130 mph any day of the week, and is every bit as comfortable as Euro brands.

The Acura also matches the competition tech for tat. It’s fuel-injected, 24-valve V-6 produces 161 horsepower a boasts a well-endowed torque curve. Its suspension is state of the art. Its steering is speed-sensitive. Its options include anti-lock brakes and a driver’s-side air bag.

Yes indeed, the Acura Legend Coupe has the goods to run with the big boys. We’re thrilled to welcome this fearless status quo challenger to the Ten Best fold.

Unintended publicity has made the Audi 5000 one of the best-known brands in America. May the whistle-blowers and white knights tumble from their high horses: the 5000 is still one of the Ten Best Cars money can buy.

While the Nadersayers search in vain for flaws in the 5000’s makeup, we find plenty of beauty. The flush-windowed, round-cornered bodywork slides through the atmosphere with ease. The five-cylinder engine (normally aspirated or turbocharged) is smooth and potent. The four- wheel-drive models are sure-footed in the nastiest of conditions. Anti-lock brakes are standard on the Quattros and optional on the other 5000s. The fastback wagon is pure art on wheels.

We keep coming back to the 5000 for more because it’s the definitive driver’s sedan. Its cockpit is comfortable and well laid out; its controls do their best to answer your every whim. If you’re interested in grace, space, and pace, look no further.

The racetrack has been good for the Corvette: development programs with several SCCA/Escort Endurance Series teams have helped hone Chevy’s two-seater to a fine edge. Corvette upgrades for 1988 include larger standard brakes, optional heavy-duty brakes, subtle but effective changes in the front and rear geometries, and seventeen-inch wheels and tires. The grueling crucible of Showroom Stock racing was particularly helpful in perfecting the new base brakes. Teams that win on Sunday have proved to be very capable developmental allies on Monday.

The Corvette engineers have also squeezed a few more horsepower out of their fuel-injected, 5.7-liter V-8. A modest redesign of the aluminum cylinder heads has improved flow characteristics and upped the output of the manual-transmission models to 245 horsepower. (The automatic editions are rated at 240 horsepower because of a less efficient exhaust system.)

With more poise, more power, and more freedom from squeaks and rattles, the Corvette is maturing into a fine sports car. So far, the imports haven’t been able to catch Chevy’s heartthrob car, on or off the track.

Let’s hear it for perseverance. This is the tenth year for the Mustang in its current guise, and the Ford engineers are so happy with what they’ve wrought that they’ve made virtually no changes for 1988.

The Mustang GT and its more sedately styled stablemate, the LX, have come a long way since their years as wobbly-legged foals of the Fairmont platform. The 1988 V-8 Stangs are ripsnorting stallions, with 225 horsepower and 300 pound-feet of torque under their hoods. Dip deep into their throttles at any rpm and the frisky Fords respond with a wallop of good old-fashioned American torque—enough to make you forget all about four-valve combustion chambers and high-tech turbochargers.

A one-dimensional runner the Mustang is most definitely not. It has the suspension, the brakes, and the cockpit equipment to defend itself nicely in the GT wars. To the Ford planners who are currently plotting the fate of this model, we say: We’ll take another decade of Mustangs as good as this one.

Two years ago, the Ford Taurus was a high-stakes roll of the dice. Sensing that the public was ready for a new kind of American family sedan, Ford bet the house on a car that neither looked like nor drove like anything gone before. Fortunately, the engineers and the designers had done the job right, and the public responded with enthusiasm. As the Taurus enters its third year of production, the roads are crowded with its sleek sophistication, and the old way of building mom-and- pop-mobiles is obsolete.

The Taurus blueprint has been altered little for 1988. The most significant change is the addition of a larger V-6 to the engine lineup. The new 3.8-liter engine (used previously in other Ford and Mercury lines) has a balance shaft for smoothness and 34 percent more torque than the 3.0-liter V-6. It brings no newfound horsepower to the party, however.

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You have our permission to assume two things: that the Taurus engineers are not on an extended coffee break, and that they’ll award their car a substantial boost in horsepower sometime during the next eighteen months.

In case you haven’t noticed, Honda is rapidly becoming an American car company. Accord production began in Ohio in 1982, and some Civic models were added to the program in 1986. In 1988, Honda will begin shipping some of its U.S. production to Japan, and it plans exports to Europe at a later date. The company’s stateside engineering activities are on the rise, and it intends to raise the domestic content of its U.S. products to 75 percent by 1991.

The car that made much of this possible is the Accord. This is the compact sedan that feels right to both import and domestic buyers. Similarly, customers coming down from the luxury ranks and those moving up from the econobox division generally settle into their Accords with complete satisfaction.

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The Honda Accord’s magic lies not in its basic design— now shared by countless other small sedans—but in its execution. From remote trunk release to temperature regulator, everything works with a well-oiled ease that you expect only from a machine that took years to develop. The same applies to the Accord’s driving personality. Driven politely, it shows model family-sedan behavior; pushed to the limit down the mountain pass of your choice, it rolls up its shirt sleeves to cut and thrust like a road racer.

To up the ante once more, the engineers have raised the horsepower of the Accord’s fuel-injected engine from 110 to 120. Life isn’t getting any easier for the many imitators of this car.

We expect that a loud cheer will reverberate through the Honda plant in Marysville, Ohio, when word arrives that the Civic has earned a spot on the domestic side of our Ten Best register. The Honda “associates” in Marysville will have every reason to feel proud: the engineers in Japan presented them a brilliant, all-new-for-’88 design, and the local line workers have done their part to make the new Civic a smash hit. (The Japanese workers also deserve a share of the credit, since roughly a third of the Civics sold here—the three- and five-door body styles—are still assembled in e Land of the Rising Sun.)

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The 1988 Civics don’t look much different from last year’s models, because the emphasis was on improving their chassis and driveline equipment. Fuel injection and four-valve combustion chambers are now standard across the board. The suspension system has been upgraded with unequal-length control arms in front and a multilink arrangement in back. The wheelbases and overall lengths are up slightly, providing more interior room and a better ride. The exterior designs of the three body styles follow modern aerodynamic trends, minimizing drag and maximizing eye appeal.

The downside is the overtime that the Marysville associates will probably have to put in as they try to meet the demand for their new domestic Civics.

Like the Civic, with which it shares some components, the Honda CRX has returned in a blaze of glory after a two-year hiatus from our Ten Best list. Also like the Civic, Honda’s two-seater is all new for 1988. Its aerodynamic drag is down and its horsepower up, which means that it’s more of a runner than ever. With 105 horsepower on tap and fourteen-inch, 60-series tires on the pavement, the top-of-the-line CRX Si is one racy roller skate.

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Again like other Hondas, the CRX is a low-cowl design, providing excellent forward visibility and a bright and airy feeling inside the cockpit. This year’s styling trick is a transparent tail panel; it makes backing up an unexpected pleasure. It also gives the rear of the car that exclusive Maserati Khamsin look.

So is it lust at first sight, or do you need a full road test to convince you that your lifestyle can be molded to suit this nifty two-seater? Either way, the CRX is ready to rev its little heart out to show you what a great time $10,000 still buys.

To the casual observer, the Saab 9000 Turbo is merely a fashionable Eurosedan. The aroma of leather upholstery beckons the unsuspecting to step inside, where they’ll find scarcely a clue to what will happen when the 160-horsepower engine reaches full boil. The combination of four cylinders, two cams, sixteen valves, one turbo, and one intercooler clicks in at 2500 rpm, and that’s when the Caspar Milquetoasts of the universe typically invoke their favorite deities. It’s quite a sight to see grown men and women enjoy their first doses of acceleration beyond the pale.Car enthusiasts, of course, take the Saab 9000 Turbo rocket ride in stride. They work their way through traffic at 10 mph above the national average, seldom cracking their composure. Only the shrewdest of their neighbors realize how much fun they’re having on the way to work in this Swedish siren.

To those in the know, the understated 9000 Turbo makes excellent sense. It makes even more sense in 1988: anti-lock brakes have been added to the standard-equipment list. Now the closet racers who rush to and from board meetings in 9000 Turbos will be able to brake another hundred yards later as they rush the tollbooths.